Ever Fallen in Love Read online

  Zoë Strachan was born in Kilmarnock in 1975. Her debut novel, Negative Space, won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Saltire First Scottish Book of the Year Award. In 2003 The Independent on Sunday listed her in their top twenty novelists under 30, and the Scottish Review of Books selected her as one of their new generation of five young Scottish authors in 2011. She has been awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship, the Hermann Kesten Stipendium and a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. She lives in Glasgow with her partner, the author Louise Welsh. You can find out more at www.zoestrachan.com

  Praise for Zoë Strachan

  NEGATIVE SPACE

  A perfect eye for the small detail … the first person voice drifts between past and present with astonishing effectiveness. Intimate and real.

  Scarlett Thomas, Independent on Sunday

  Strachan understands and conveys raw emotion. Many readers will connect with this story.

  Diva

  Honest, intimate and powerful … You’ll find yourself filled with an astonishingly vivid sense of what it is like to cope with the death of a loved one.

  Iafrica.com

  The best queer novels are the ones which queer the landscape, where gay is every bit as apolitical as straight and where gender and sexuality are very much like shoes – they fit for as long as we want them to. Zoê Strachan’s Negative Space is a brilliantly executed queer read in the sense that sex is more of an issue than sexuality. The L word doesn’t even come into it. Strachan writes from the heart – the striving splintered heart. This is not so much a gay novel, but a great novel.

  Negative Space was nominated for

  The Big Gay Read 2006 by Helen Walsh

  A powerful portrayal of grief

  The Scotsman

  The language is choice, the milieu is that of the post-art school set, dives, pubs, the cold familiarity of Glasgow, and the extreme cold (and beauty) of Orkney. . . . It is the rich and warm process of a person understanding through death how and why they love, and how and why they love different people in almost precisely the same way.

  Paul Wessel in the Cape Times (South Africa)

  SPIN CYCLE

  Strachan follows her prize-winning first novel Negative Space with another well-observed and quietly forceful story about women in emotional turmoil … She makes us notice the everyday detail of their working lives, the minor tensions and the camaraderie, the idle chat and occasional pearls of wisdom, and introduces us to a parade of those strange people without washing machines who all get cameo parts while they’re waiting for the spin cycle to finish.

  Independent on Sunday

  Spin Cycle has the noir sexiness of Dance With a Stranger: idiosyncratic individuals, gnarled by bitterness and covetous desire, moments of small embarrassment and mundane realism, the eventual breathless climax . . . A gripping novel, full of twisted psychology and dark, covert obsessions; both murky and dazzling.

  Uncut

  Pitch-perfect: intelligent construction, unrelenting tension and a redemptive flourish of an ending.

  The Big Issue

  One of the most gorgeously written books I’ve read in a long time. Strachan illuminates the failings and dreams of her cast in graceful, probing brush strokes. Each page is wondrous and urgent and leaves you gasping for more. Strachan rocks.

  Helen Walsh, author of Brass

  Bringing the launderette sub-genre bang up to date, Strachan’s three damaged female protagonists are complex, secretive and isolated. A rich, poignant work.

  The List

  Strachan breathes life into her characters and settings, and there’s a warmth to her prose which suffuses reading about them with a sense of intimacy.

  Glasgow Herald

  The tension never dips, dialogue is perfect. A must read.

  Daily Record

  By the same author

  Negative Space

  Spin Cycle

  EVER FALLEN IN LOVE

  Zoë Strachan

  First published in Great Britain by

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  PO Box 5725

  One High Street

  Dingwall

  Ross-shire

  IV15 9WJ

  Scotland.

  www.sandstonepress.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored or transmitted in any form without the express

  written permission of the publisher.

  © Zoë Strachan 2011

  The moral right of Zoe Strachan to be recognised as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.

  The author acknowledges support from

  Creative Scotland towards the writing of this volume.

  ISBN-epub: 978-1-908737-00-7

  Cover design by Guilherme Condeixa

  Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore.

  For

  Louise Welsh

  0

  You wouldn’t think that there were still women who could be ruined. Perhaps there aren’t any more, but back then, in that university town by the sea, there were. It was quite an old-fashioned place. Luke was quite old-fashioned too. Cast himself as a latter day Dorian or Valmont, sinned the old sins.

  He knew how I felt about him, of course. By then I’d stopped even trying to conceal it.

  We were sitting on the windowsill of the pool room in the Union. I heard a shriek and traced his gaze to a girl who was celebrating her lucky, winning shot. She brandished her cue in the air, shook hands with her opponent, clinked pint glasses with her friends, all without quite losing her self-consciousness.

  Her?

  Yes, she’ll do, he said.

  He gave me twenty pence to stake his claim. A stake which could be raised; he’d honed his technique during his teenage years, his apprenticeship. Better she’d lost, kept quiet. Her taste for games was unlikely to match his.

  I’ll play you, I said, laying his money on the table. If you want.

  You’re on, she said.

  I have to warn you, I’m not very good.

  How about doubles then? You and your pal against me and Diane.

  Perfect, I said, smiling at Diane as I went to select a cue.

  I’d been striving to develop an epicene quality, in keeping with my tender years. And it was working, to an extent: women found it non-threatening, attractive even, if I’m not flattering myself too much. I indulged it because finally I could. Unlike so many of my peers I was emphatically working class. And so was Luke.

  But you’re wondering about the girl I was talking to, while he went to the bar to buy tequila all round. Her name was Lucy (short for Lucinda, though she tried not to let on). I recognised her from one of my philosophy options. She always came in late, bells jingling around the ankles of her 14-hole Doc Martens, and sat at the front of the old wooden-benched lecture room, picking her cuticles and trying to bring everything back to Nietzsche even when we’d moved on to Heidegger.

  Luke’s timing was good. There was still an hour’s drinking to be done, but her friends were fading fast, apart from loyal Diane, whose heavily mascaraed eyes, slightly magnified, peered through her specs at me with mistrust. I sensed a little crush on Lucy, who remained high and bright and on a roll. Going by the white-girl braids in her hair, the five silver hoops in each ear, the barbell through her right eyebrow, she was rebelling within her confines. That was the fashion back then; I understand that generic honey blonde and an English-rose complexion are more aspirational now. For him it was enough to know that she’d graduate, swap tie-dye for cashmere, let her piercings heal.

  I’m Richard, I said.

  Lucy.

 
; Yes, I know. Philosophy 2a.

  I thought I recognised you from somewhere. Who’s your friend?

  That’s what everyone asked, I thought, as I watched Luke weave towards us, a brace of shot glasses in each hand. Who’s your friend?

  1

  It was a done deal. Stephie would get off the train in Inverness; he’d collect her at the station. Richard swivelled his chair away from his desk and towards the window. The small ferry was pootling towards the islands with its cargo of day-trippers. At first he’d been surprised to see the people carriers parked at the jetty. All those middle class families posed for photographs by the Aquila Maris. The contents of purses checked and measured into helpings of tea, scones and souvenir stamps from the only part of the country still to require special postage to reach the mainland. In a few hours time the visitors would wobble from the gangplank, ready to be absorbed by their designed-for-safety vehicles. They’d drive along the single track roads, melting into their campsites and caravan parks, leaving the area as peaceful as if their presence had been a mirage.

  Peaceful, yes, Richard had felt peaceful too, but now the arrival of his little sister was niggling in his consciousness. 4.30pm tomorrow. He closed his email and looked at the screen for a few more moments before deciding that he felt too unsettled to do more work. He’d get the spare room ready, go back to it later. It was only as his computer sang out its goodbye that he realised that he had no idea how long Stephie intended to stay.

  In the supermarket the next day, he selected instant meals and microwave snacks, salads and pulses, rye bread and Mother’s Pride. Would she want to gorge herself on junk food or might she be observing some celebrity-endorsed food fad? He skimmed the shelves for products labelled organic and low GI. Was she still a vegetarian? (Had she ever been a vegetarian?) Chocolate. All girls liked chocolate, surely. He even browsed the DVDs, hesitated over a popular horror (his house was isolated, it might freak her out), before finally grabbing a teen flick, a costume drama and the second series of a comedy show he’d never watched but whose catchphrases he recognised when they were regurgitated in the newspapers. At the toiletries aisle he picked up the most expensive bubble bath they had; it was possible that Stephie was recovering from some emotional trauma and would want to spend hours in the bathroom.

  And now here he was, shivering by the ticket machines in a T-shirt chosen to announce ‘just because I live up north doesn’t mean I can’t be edgy’, watching the jam of people brandishing railcards and jostling each other with rucksacks as they squeezed past the two ticket inspectors. A flicker of eye contact with a tourist, and then Richard looked away. He felt himself blending into the background, hoped that Stephie would notice him the instant she arrived. The mystery wasn’t what she ate or liked to watch on television, but why she wanted to come to stay at all. And indeed why her parents (who were, he had to remind himself, his parents too) considered it such a good idea.

  ‘She’s got a lot of studying to catch up on,’ his mother had typed, ominously. ‘She could do with less distractions.’

  And so what had been mooted – as far as he was concerned – as a vague plan had taken firm shape despite his protestation that he had a deadline looming and would not be on hand to babysit.

  ‘She’s far too old for a babysitter,’ the admonitory reply had blinked back in the open email window. ‘She can amuse herself.’

  When he was Stephie’s age he’d certainly been able to amuse himself. He often wondered what he’d do if he could go back and relive that period, usually coming to the uncomfortable conclusion that he’d do exactly the same again. Which didn’t necessarily make him a textbook guardian for an impressionable youngster.

  ‘Hey there.’ Stephie was standing in front of him, twisting one foot behind the other.

  ‘Hey, hello! Here, let me,’ he indicated her wheelie case, which she manoeuvred towards him. It was heavy and swollen, the zip strained, and once again Richard worried how long she was planning to stay. But then women always packed more, didn’t they? Make up and so on. It might be an overnight bag, for all he knew.

  ‘When did you go blonde?’ he asked, noticing that what he remembered as shoulder length brown hair had been replaced by a crop of mixed highlights.

  ‘Ages ago,’ she said, wriggling into the straps of the small day sack she’d been swinging from one arm.

  ‘Right. Well, it’s nice. I like it.’

  ‘Got it done in Ayr,’ she said. ‘Didn’t trust the blue rinse merchants at home.’

  ‘Don’t blame you. Anyway, car’s out here,’ Richard said. ‘How’s your journey been? Hellish?’

  ‘All right,’ she shrugged. ‘I slept.’

  ‘Well, we’ve got a bit further to go,’ he said, trying not to look at the dark smudges beneath her eyes. Outside the sky had drawn closer and greyer, and the people dressed in vests and shorts looked foolish and out of place. Richard unlocked the door of his battered Ford.

  ‘Nice car. Thought you earned a packet now?’

  ‘Does the job. Nobody to show off to around here anyway.’

  ‘And me bringing all my glad rags just in case.’

  ‘I’ve explained what it’s like.’

  ‘Yeah but none of us have ever seen it, have we? We’ve never been.’

  ‘I sent jpegs.’

  ‘A jpeg isn’t an invitation to dinner.’

  Richard pulled up at the give way at the car park exit, shot a glance at his sister. She was looking straight ahead. Seeing rain spots on the windscreen he switched the wipers on, used the movement as an excuse to reach out and grasp her arm.

  ‘You’re here now.’

  ‘I’m honoured,’ she said. ‘So, how much further is a bit?’

  ‘About three hours?’

  ‘Okay.’ She turned in her seat and withdrew a pair of sunglasses from the pocket of her jeans. ‘I’m going to grab another forty winks. Wake me when it gets scenic.’

  0

  There must, I suppose, have been a point of no return. It would be indulgent to claim it was the first moment I laid eyes on Luke, when it’s enough just to say that I met him on the day I left home. I got the bus, which was, as everyone insisted with a frequency that soon became irksome, a long road for a short cut. My parents drove me to the terminus and we said our farewells, much to the interest of the local jakey, who seemed to believe I was going off to war. He broke into a garbled chorus of ‘Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye’, swaying his can of Special Brew in encouragement as we loaded my suitcase and rucksack into the side of the coach. Must’ve been all the time he spent propped on the bench by the war memorial, or perhaps he’d spotted me at work one Saturday, assumed the white gravestones I was scrubbing were those of my comrades in arms. I twisted round in the back seat to see the cemetery as we left, cricking my neck until I caught sight of the headstones beyond the high wall. Although I was desperate to go, I couldn’t help looking back.

  It was a tedious bus ride from the ’Leck to Drumrigg, from Drumrigg to Glasgow, from there across to the coast and on. I almost wished I’d allowed my parents to drive me rather than palming them off with promises of mid-term visits. But as the route became less familiar, the boredom was leavened by that sense of anticipation that starts as a delicate throb in your chest then flutters through your stomach, brightening your eyes and refining your senses. Something’s coming, I thought, something is on its way. And indeed it was. As the coach grew warmer, an unmistakable smell emerged. Piquant, as though a sloppy puddle of spew lay rank and undiscovered under a seat not far from my own. I felt nauseated, obviously, but worse than that I started to imagine the odour permeating my clothes and skin. A startling flash-forward saw me arriving at university and earning the nickname of Boakboy, which would stick to me like, well, sick, until graduation. Which seemed a very, very long way in the future.

  No, this was my New Start, as the posters outside the Job Centre liked to trumpet, and I’d have sold my granny (her mind was beginning to drift, she’d s
carcely have noticed) rather than let anything smear its lustre. Boakboy may have been sheer paranoid fantasy, but by the time I reached the city I thought, sod this for a game of soldiers. Gathering my backpack and unwieldy case (veteran of family holidays and that trip to Spain ‘before you two were born’), I dragged myself to railway station, where I blew a fair portion of the emergency twenty quid my mother had sneaked into my hand on the train fare. And so I ended up on the same Scotrail express service that Luke joined at Edinburgh Waverley. It must have been fate that brought us together, chance was never so precise.

  There were plenty of seats, but loose-limbed and smoky he chose one across the table from me. When he stretched to squash his rucksack into the luggage rack his t-shirt rose, allowing me to glimpse a dark curl of hair above the waistband of his jeans, the very tip of an appendectomy scar. I allowed myself the tiniest of fantasies, of unbuttoning his fly right there and then. As I’d put on my new clothes ready for the journey I’d felt that I was slipping into a new skin, becoming truly me. Sexual experimentation at universities was rife, or so they always said, but my gayness was no untested hypothesis. It was ready to be published and, with any luck, peer-reviewed.

  That said, if sitting opposite a pretty boy on the train was my first test of valour, I flunked it. A little half smile was all I managed before inclining my head back towards my book. Excitement prevented me from reading properly. Not at his proximity – it wasn’t love at first sight – but at what lay ahead. Although I turned the pages at regular intervals my thoughts hardly touched whatever it was I was reading. One of my course texts perhaps; Sartre or Kierkegaard, a volume more likely chosen for show than enthusiasm. I felt as if an aura of energy was crackling around me, that surely he’d detect.